This invention relates generally to display fixtures, and more particularly to racks for displaying and vending plural belts.
Belts are commonly vended by suspending them from belt racks. Generally, the belts are arranged on the racks by size, with various styles of belts being co-mingled within a given size. The advantage of displaying belts on a rack, as opposed to packaging them in boxes, is that a customer can view the entire belt and try it on without the necessity of having to remove it from a box, and possibly not replace it in the box when placing it back on a counter.
One of the problems of utilizing earlier types of belt racks is that quite often customers will remove the belt from its suspending bar, and replace the belt on a different bar. Quite often, the belt is not replaced with belts of a similar size. This creates a major problem for a store attempting to maintain inventory of given sizes and styles, and in addition, prevents a customer from noticing that a belt in his size is available, since he/she will only look at belts on the portion of the rack containing his/her size. That problem has been obviated by my earlier invention which is the subject of U.S. Pat. No. 4,253,576, which is assigned to the same assignee as this invention, and whose disclosure is incorporated by reference herein.
That invention comprises a fixture supporting plural belt racks thereon for display and vending. That fixture makes use of a color coding system for the belts. In particular, by utilizing the color coding system, all of the belts that are on display are provided with a color code which separates belts as to size. For instance, all small belts will be coded brown, all medium belts will be coded yellow, all large belts will be coded red and all extra-large belts will be coded green. In this way, the store can maintain the integrity of the sizes by arranging the belts in their proper colors.
The one problem remaining with the aforementioned coding system per se is that there is no way of segregating the belts as to style. Thus, sport belts, dress belts, fabric belts, etc. will all be co-mingled under a given size. This creates an inconvenience for the customer who is only looking for a particular style of belt. Furthermore, the store has no ready way of maintaining inventory between different styles because all of the styles are co-mingled within a given size range. The store can accordingly have twelve belts of one style in a given size while having only one belt of a different style in the same size.
The fixture of my aforementioned patent also overcomes this problem by providing a belt rack comprising a plurality of sections, with each of said sections having indicia thereon, said indicia comprising a different color for each section, each section having a plurality of spokes thereon and a plurality of hang tags for suspending belts from the spokes, with each hang tag in a given section having the same color as the color indicium of said section, with said colors being used to separate the belts by style.
Prior art belt vending racks, even those constructed in accordance with my aforementioned patent, have made use of plural prongs, each of the same length, for suspending belts of a given size therefrom. As is known by those skilled in the belt merchandizing art that there is a lower demand for very small and very large sizes, e.g., "men's" 30"/32" and 42", respectively, while there is a larger demand for slightly larger and slightly smaller sizes, e.g., "men's" 34" and 40", respectively. The largest demand is for the intermediate sizes, e.g., "men's" 36" and 38". Thus, it is a common practice for merchandisers to keep a larger inventory of the more popular sizes and a smaller inventory of the less popular sizes. That being the case, where there is only a small inventory of unpopular sizes on hand and which are suspended from some of the fixture's prongs, the fixture will appear less than full, i.e., the prongs suspending the more popular sizes will appear full. This partially unfilled appearance is unpleasing aesthetically and commercially, and thus can have a detrimental effect from a marketing standpoint.
Hence, a need presently exists to provide a fixture for racks of belts so that they may be vended in such a way that there appears to be a full inventory of all sizes, even though there are less belts on the racks for the less popular sizes and more belts on the rack to the more popular sizes.